Transformational Fiction: Making Charles Sorel’s <i>L’Histoire comique de Francion</i> English

Messy, contradictory, unresolved, eighteenth-century English fiction is often read as a stage in the process through which the modern novel, as we recognize it, eventually distinguished itself as a coherent genre. This article focuses on mid-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English versions of Charles Sorel’s popular L’Histoire comique de Francion (1633)—an unstable mix of Cervantine anti-romance and grubby picaresque realism—to examine the role translation played in creating a taste for formally incoherent fiction in the period. With its professed value as an exemplary moral tale undermined by its coarse humour and prurient allure, the English Francion proved uniquely appealing to readers. By recognizing this appeal, the article argues that we can newly appreciate how such entertaining incoherence was essential to a concept of fiction distinctive to the English eighteenth century, albeit with transnational origins.